Excerpt from the guardian.com, Your next box set: Firefly: Joss Whedon's shortlived sci-fi series is a rich blend of western and Star Wars – what a shame it was cut down in its prime by Daniel Bettridge,Thursday 22 March 2012

A genre-fusing concoction of western and science fiction, Firefly had a great cast, top-notch writing and plenty of the trademark quick-witted dialogue that had been so popular on Whedon's previous smash hit series, Buffy The Vampire Slayer. What it didn't have, however, was an audience, as the mainstream failed to cotton on to the concept that cult fans were lapping up.

In all, just 11 episodes of the pithy space soap were shown (though 14 were made) and some of those were aired out of sequence at the bequest of the same broadcasting brains trust who were also responsible for the untimely demise of Arrested Development. The show failed not because of the quality of the concept, but because the Fox studio simply didn't know what to do with a series that didn't fit into any established programming pigeonhole.

Set 500 years in the future, Firefly takes place in a not-too-distant solar system where people are living on a smattering of planets that have been terraformed to house the growing human population. The result is a sort of futuristic frontier town, a unique mashup of cultures, conventions and characters that straddle a line between John Wayne western and Star Wars. In any other hands it would be little more than an interesting McGuffin, but thanks to Whedon's eye for detail, Firefly is a richly textured, charming conceit.